This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention disclosed below. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived, implemented or described. Therefore, unless otherwise explicitly indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section. Abbreviations that may be found in the specification and/or the drawing figures are defined below, at the beginning of the detailed description section.
Operators of cellular networks have been undertaking initiatives to enable greater use of open interfaces as well as analytics and machine learning and real-time analytics in the radio access network (RAN), especially for radio resource management (RRM) functions, in an effort to improve the performance and automation of the network. For example, in the xRAN forum and ORAN alliance, the network architecture employs a Radio Intelligent Controller (RIC) in order to aid in improving performance and automation.
The RIC may consist of a near-real-time portion (RIC near-RT) and a non-real-time portion (RIC-non-RT). Both of these might be used for machine learning systems, though the non-RT portion is assumed to operate over a longer period of time than does the near-RT portion, which is assumed to operate in close to real time.
However, in order to achieve these objectives of performance and automation for different functions of the RAN, new algorithms and interactions are needed. The RIC near-RT and RIC non-RT can be viewed as platforms on which such new functions and algorithms can be hosted.
One application of these is to help the cellular network perform cell selection for user equipment (UE). This is explained in more detail below.